ALEMAN, MATED. A famous Spanish novelist, horn at Seville about the middle of the sixteenth century. Little is known of his life except that he took his bachelor's degree at Seville in 1565, was appointed to the royal treas ury in position which he resigned after twenty years as poor as when he assumed it— and is supposed subsequently to have gone to America, and to have died in Mexico during the reign of Philip 11L His writings include a poetical biography of St. Anthony of Padua (1004) and an Ortografla castcllana (Mexico, 1608). His great work, however, is Guzman de 47J'uracic (1599), a novel with a rogue for the hero, which revives the picaresque tradition of Mendoza's Lazurillo de 'formes. Guzman at once became exceedingly popular, and within six years had run through twenty-six editions, aggregating upward of 50,000 copies, besides being translated into French and Italian. hi 1623 James Mabbe published the first English version, of which Ben Janson wrote: "This Spanish Proteus, though writ but in one tongue, was formed with the world's wit." Both in the delineation of manners
and in the purity of style, Guzman ranks next to Laz'arillo, which is recognized as the enduring type of the comic prose epic. While lacking Mendoza's originality, conciseness, and caustic humor, Aleman shows keen powers of observation and a wide knowledge of human nature; and in Guzman he has given the world a most diverting study of blockguardism, his hero showing all the resources of a consummate rascal in the various characters of stable boy, beggar, thief, coxcomb, mercenary, valet, and merchant. The book, how ever, is marred by the moral reflections of the author, which obtrude themselves with somewhat wearisome persistence. The best edition of Ale man is found in Aribaus's Biblioteca de autores espanoles, vol. iii. (Madrid, 1846).